Benjamin Wachs: Protecting the wrong rights

Wednesday

Nov 23, 2011 at 12:01 AMNov 23, 2011 at 10:14 PM

If people can’t protest the banks, then the banks sure as sin shouldn’t be allowed to spend money to influence an election.

Benjamin Wachs

Let me get this straight: we can’t implement campaign finance laws because corporate money is protected free speech, but we can arrest Occupy Wall Street because nonviolent protest in a public place is not?

The Occupy movement has forced us to look at the truth. Twenty-first century America has a business model where its conscience ought to be.

Deploying a weapon of mass economic destruction against the American people gets you a bonus check that the government won’t tax because that might discourage you from doing it again; peacefully protesting against a system that polls show over 75 percent of Americans know is broken gets you pepper sprayed, beaten and arrested.

If people can’t protest the banks, then the banks sure as sin shouldn’t be allowed to spend money to influence an election.

Yet this isn’t the first time we’ve had to face a gaping inconsistency like this. Every so often America comes to the same crossroads. When is it acceptable for the government to use force against its own citizens as they petition for the redress of grievances?

In the late 19th and early 20th century the government took the side of businesses against unions. Protesting against unsafe and unfair working conditions was deemed too great a threat to the Republic to be allowed. (Remember, these weren’t union advocates for bigger pensions or the right to take more breaks — these were unions advocating for the right to have safe working conditions and a reasonable wage.) Union organizers were arrested, beaten and sometimes murdered for being union organizers. But eventually the people won.

In the middle of the 20th century, television news carried footage of peaceful civil rights marchers being beaten by police, attacked by police dogs and sprayed with fire hoses. Once again, Americans had to decide, was this an appropriate response to people marching for their rights? Did whatever laws they were violating truly outweigh their right to assemble peacefully and demand redress for an injustice? It took shamefully long, but America rallied more quickly this time than it had the last, attacking a civil rights march with dogs was a greater injustice than violating laws about segregated drinking fountains and buses.

Eventually the people won.

At the UC Davis campus this month, peaceful Occupy protestors were assaulted — there’s no other word for it — by police using pepper spray. The video captures it clearly. Protesters were sitting on the ground, threatening no one, when an officer in no danger doused them with pepper spray, over and over again. This follows video footage of peaceful Occupy protestors in other cities across America being assaulted, beaten and violently arrested.

It cannot be justified. Whatever laws they are violating are city statutes, while the First Amendment of the Constitution states that Congress shall make no law abridging “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

I’ll grant you that they’re petitioning in a way that is inconvenient to the government, but they are peacefully assembling and petitioning for a redress of very serious grievances. If freedom means anything at all it means that one can be inconvenient to the government and to big business. If we don’t have that we ain’t got nothing.

Besides, this isn’t a question of what’s legal and illegal, it’s a question of what’s right and wrong.

If this injustice could be addressed at the ballot box, that would be one thing. But Republicans and Democrats have both passed campaign finance reform, only to see it invalidated. Republicans and Democrats have both presided over administrations that let Wall Street and big banks destroy the economy and arrested no one. Republicans and Democrats have both bailed out big businesses with taxpayer dollars and then demanded that the middle class accept cuts to education, Social Security and the armed forces so that the people whose wealth we protected won’t have to pay their fair share of the burden.

A country that says corporate money is protected free speech but peaceful protest isn’t deserves to be protested.

A country that protects the money of its businesses more than the rights of its citizens is wrong. A country that arrests peaceful protestors for violating civic code in pursuit of civil justice is wrong. A country that lets them be violently attacked is immoral.

Apparently we need to rediscover that over and over again.

Benjamin Wachs writes for Messenger Post Media, and is the editor of Fiction365.com. Email him at Benjamin@Fiction365.com.